The bioterrorism attacks and hoaxes in the United States in the fall of 2001 placed tremendous burdens on public health and safety organizations charged with the responsibility of testing the thousands of samples that concerned citizens suspect might contain anthrax. With each confirmed case of illness from anthrax reported, thousands of calls were placed to law enforcement and emergency personnel regarding suspicious white powders and the like found in private homes, offices, restaurants, post offices, on subways, and in schools and shopping centers. Overwhelmingly these substances were found to be benign, many as mundane as pizza flour and vanilla pudding mix according to news accounts at the time. One source of many false alarms is cornstarch that is used to sort mass mailings to prevent envelopes from sticking together.
Unfortunately the anthrax scares greatly taxed the resources of health and safety personnel as each substance had to be subjected to expensive and time consuming testing in the field, a laboratory, or both. Among the techniques currently used for testing of samples suspected of containing anthrax are antibody tests, bacterial culture, and DNA testing. Each of these techniques has one or more significant limitations with respect to speed, expense, accuracy, false positives, false negatives, and/or ability to screen for multiple pathogens and toxins in parallel.
One approach currently utilized for field-testing of anthrax and other biowarfare agents are lateral flow test strips. These devices, which function much like home pregnancy tests, utilize antibodies that bind to specific proteins associated with particular pathogens of concern. Since different organisms express different sets of proteins, users of these antibody-based products must stock a different test strip for each of anthrax, ricin, botulinum toxin, SEB (Staphococcal Enterotoxin B), plague, etc. Moreover, since the process of raising antibodies in mammals remains slow and cumbersome, antibody based assays are difficult to manufacture in very large quantities in a short time period that may be required to respond to an unexpected bioterrorist attack.
It would therefore be desirable to have an assay that can be used by first responders to assess substances suspected of being biowarfare agents so as to rapidly and inexpensively eliminate a variety of mundane substances before more advanced testing is employed.
It would also be desirable to have an assay of the aforementioned type that can be used in conjunction with substances suspected of containing a wide range of biowarfare agents.
It would further be desirable to have an assay of the aforementioned type that can be manufactured in large quantities in a short period of time in the event of a surprise terrorist attack.